Guest Columnist

Stressing Parenthood

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: July 16, 2006

In the lead essay to this year’s “State of Our Unions” report, which was released last week by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead looks at popular television shows, surveys, books and magazines and concludes that parents today are an unhappy lot. They’re anxious, depressed, warring in stress-torn marriages and feeling “out of sync” with a larger, adult world of “fun.”

TimesSelect subscribers are invited to comment about this Op-Ed article on Judith Warner's blog, Domestic Disturbances.

Parents feel this way, she says, in part because they’ve been spoiled by too many years of childless living. Earlier generations began raising children just after their teens and had such large families that they were busy with their kids well into middle age. But today’s adults have children later and have fewer of them, spending decades instead soused on cosmopolitans and scattering their disposable income on Caribbean vacations — all of which makes buckling down to the financial and personal constraints of life with children extremely difficult. The situation is the worst among — Guess who? — highly educated professional women, for whom life with little people who have no respect for time management and no ability to generate performance reviews is as much a shock, Whitehead writes, as was Victorian brides’ first experience of sex.

Though I’ve previously been tagged as one of the chief purveyors of mommy misery, I have to say that I cannot recognize myself — or anyone I know — in this picture.

That isn’t to say that other parents and I don’t suffer from stress, anxiety or sometime marital tensions. Of course we do. But does that mean that parenthood is for us the “source,” as Whitehead puts it, of dissatisfaction and distress?

Absolutely not. On the contrary: children are the bright spot — the joy — that makes every other aspect of life worthwhile. Furthermore, motherhood, rather than “losing its luster” as Whitehead attests, seems to me to be considered a more worthy and desirable vocation now than it was at any other time in recent memory. (Our 50’s- and early-60’s-era moms never talked about it with the reverential breathiness we routinely muster.) If anything, in this era when having children is a choice, and women’s infertility struggles drive home the fact that the ability to become pregnant is a gift, I would say that parenthood is more highly prized than ever.

To suggest otherwise, to assert that mothers and fathers who express something other than Hallmark card sentiments about life with children somehow have issues with parenthood, is profoundly unfair. But it isn’t new. For at least five years now, ever since “mommy lit” emerged as a best-selling book genre, there have been stolid folk who have been using words like “whiners” and “spoiled” to get parents — and educated mothers in particular — to put up or shut up. And the way they most commonly do this is to recast big social problems as the little personal problems of those who “complain” about them.

Yet “the rising chorus of complaint” that Whitehead and other critics decry is based upon rock-solid reality. The depression and anxiety and angst and guilt they see — and trivialize — aren’t due to parents’ cravings for bigger cars or better clothes; they’re due to the fact that life for most parents is really hard. It’s expensive and competitive and stressful and fatiguing, for reasons that have nothing to do with having a bad attitude toward the challenges — and pleasures — of child-rearing.

Not having access to decent child care or affordable health care or good quality public education is not a question of attitude. Neither is being frustrated that you can’t ever make it home for a family dinner because you can’t afford to work a decent schedule or to live close enough to work to make it home at a decent hour. Talking about these problems isn’t a condemnation of parenthood; it’s a condemnation of the way parenthood is being lived, in our culture, at this particular time.

The problems facing American families — the dilemmas currently sapping the joy out of motherhood for vast numbers of women in particular — are real social and economic phenomena. They can’t be fixed just by changes in attitudes or “priorities” — at least, not just by changes in the attitudes and priorities of individual women or families. They require social change — a new attitude toward collective responsibility, a new infusion of meaning into debates about our nation’s values. And they require listening to mothers’ (and fathers’) complaints — not shutting them up.

Judith Warner, the author of “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect, will be a guest columnist through the end of July.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 16, 2006, on page WK12 of the New York edition with the headline: Stressing Parenthood.